[Hiring] Engineering Manager, Cloud Services @Nexcess

Role Description

You will run and own one engineering team end-to-end: its architecture design, its delivery, and its roadmap. This is a hands-on engineering role, and you are the one person who answers for what the team lands.

• The work in flight is the visible part. The job is the machine around it: how work is scoped and cut each month, what stands between a change and production, how much of it is AI-assisted, and how much of the team's week goes to things that are not engineering.
• Business alignment and focus come first. Engineering here exists to move the business, not to be busy.
• You will pick the few things that matter most, say no to the rest out loud with the Product counterpart, and deliver them on dates the business can plan around, at a quality that does not come back as an incident or a customer escalation.
• This job is hands-on, and more so every quarter.
• Management layers here are deliberately thin, and a manager who has stopped reading code cannot lead a team whose code is mostly AI-generated.
• Whoever ships it owns it, regardless of who wrote it.
• Most code is AI-generated now, so the judgment moved to either side of it: specifying exactly what to build, and verifying that what came back is correct, secure, and operable.
• You will be Product's best friend.
• Your team goes on call for what it builds, and you take your turn on the rotation.

What we’ll measure

• Speed: DORA High, with Elite as the target.
• Predictable, reliable delivery of quality software.
• AI adoption and its impact, measured by AI-assisted outcomes.

What you’ll do

• Own architecture design, delivery and roadmap for your team.
• Build the partnership with Product that makes the roadmap real.
• Own the engineering outcomes for Cloud Services' product space.
• Stay in the work: write the specs, review pull requests yourself, and ship real changes.
• Run the AI harness yourself, and make your team run it.
• Scope and cut the work.
• Clear cross-team engineering dependencies before they block you.
• Hold the engineering bar that gets your team to DORA High and beyond.
• Grow your engineers.
• Own what you run, not only what you ship.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in software engineering, including at least one year leading engineers formally or informally.
• Hands-on technical fluency in: Perl, PHP, React, and Vue; relational databases (Postgres, MariaDB); CDN; WAF; and server security.
• Currently hands-on.
• Real, hands-on AI-assisted engineering, with impact you can quantify.
• Evidence you have made a team measurably faster.
• Delivered and modernized software to committed dates.
• A must: experience in managed hosting, cloud, or another high-availability service business.

Work Environment

• Regularly required to speak and hear.
• Regularly required to use hands for keyboarding, gross manipulation, and fine manipulation.
• Works at a desk and computer screen for extended periods of time.
• Works in a traditional climate controlled office environment or from home.
• Works in a highly stressful environment dealing with a wide variety of challenges, deadlines and diverse employee population.

Disclaimer

This job description is only a summary of the typical functions of the position. It is not intended to be an exhaustive or comprehensive list of all job responsibilities, tasks, or duties. Additional duties and tasks may be assigned as part of the job function. Liquid Web Inc. reserves the right to modify, interpret, or apply this job description in a way that best supports the organizational needs. The job description in no way creates or implies an employment contract. The employment contract remains “at will”.

Equal Employment Opportunity Policy: Liquid Web is committed to offering equal employment opportunity without regard to age, color, disability, gender, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, military status, national origin, race, religion, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic.